At Dutch National Opera, a large part of all planned productions in the past two years have been cancelled, postponed or replaced. Also in January: the planned series of performances by Le Lacrime di Eros was postponed, although ready to take to the stage behind the scenes. This week’s good news: Strauss’ already canceled production salome does go on concert three times (6, 12 and 14 February) with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Cornelius Meister.
How are you?
“I feel quite optimistic. Despite all the limitations, I am working every day. In recent weeks we have had to cancel two major opera productions that have taken up to three years to complete. That’s nothing new anymore, but it’s still worse than sour; the performers are sad and frustrated and you destroy beauty. The challenge is to re-schedule everything with fresh courage. Fortunately, the canceled production of this month worked Le lacrime di Eros move to one of the following seasons. That’s how I always think and work ahead. There is plenty to do.”
What is your biggest concern?
“That there will be a new wave of contamination in October 22. And that we will end up in this mess of standstill again. But now we proactively adjust our programming, that is not possible either: no singer would understand or accept that.”
DNO will also survive this lockdown, but what about the self-employed?
“There is an arrangement for payments to freelancers: if we cancel an opera, they receive a percentage of their fee, and if we move the production and the freelancers are available, we try to re-engage them. The government’s recommendation rate for continued payments is 75 percent, in practice it is more customised. How many performances has someone still been able to earn? Who does it concern? Some soloists and conductors earn top fees, their percentages are lower. But we always take their interests into account. The staged version of salomeplanned for February, we canceled at the beginning of January because rehearsing for a month and a half without knowing for sure whether there will be performances is very harmful for singers: after all, they are paid per performance.”
What’s going well, what’s not?
“The opera machinery here in the house is just running at full speed. The programming for 22/23 is almost complete, we will present it in March. The choir is currently rehearsing a work scheduled for next season. What worries me sometimes is that some, especially in the choir, are still really scared. We do everything we can to ensure safety, are extremely cautious and test very rigorously. But dealing with uncertainty in large collectives remains difficult.”
What does it take to make 2022 better than 2021?
„In the short term I am happy that the canceled performances of salome can still take place as concert performances. The Opera Forward Festival in March will also continue, although perhaps with less peripheral programming. I do hope that the hall capacity can be increased by then and that people will also want to buy tickets. But with the productions that were able to go on in the past two years, we did not notice any reluctance: the hall was always full at the time.”